God: The missing Word at the heart of epiphany

Every January, Christians worldwide celebrate Epiphany—a feast that ostensibly marks divine manifestation. Many liturgical traditions conflate this with the Baptism of Our Lord, reading gospel accounts of the dove descending and the voice from heaven. But here's what nobody mentions in those lectionary readings: the Greek word ἐπιφάνεια never appears in any gospel baptism narrative. Not once.

This isn't a minor detail. It's a linguistic coverup.

In ancient Greek culture, an epiphaneia was the dramatic, battlefield appearance of a god to rescue mortals from certain doom. When soldiers faced annihilation and called upon the divine, the god's sudden manifestation turned the tide of battle. This wasn't a gentle dove descending or a peaceful voice from heaven—it was armed intervention in mortal combat. The term carried the smell of blood and bronze, the thunder of divine warfare breaking through to save the desperate.

Psaul knew exactly what he was doing when he deployed this vocabulary. In 2 Thessalonians 2:8, he writes that Joshua+ “will slay the lawless one with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his epiphaneia and his coming." This isn't Psaul inventing imagery from scratch—he's borrowing directly from Isaiah 11:4, where the messianic king "shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked." Psaul takes the armor-of-God tradition and makes it explicit: Christ's appearing is a battlefield rescue operation.

The cosmic fight against evil isn't metaphorical decoration; it's the substance of what divine manifestation means.

Yet when we turn to the gospels, this vocabulary vanishes. Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe Joshua's baptism with the dove descending (κατέρχομαι), the voice declaring belovedness—but no epiphaneia. John's gospel doesn't even narrate the baptism directly, though he references it. The gospel writers chose their words carefully, and they deliberately avoided the militarized language that Psaul centers.

Why does this matter? Because we've constructed an entire liturgical feast around a word that the primary Joshua+ narratives never use for the event we're supposedly celebrating. We've taken Psaul's battlefield vocabulary, stripped it of its military context, and retrofitted it onto a baptism scene that never claimed it. Then modern interpreters take Psaul's already softer pastoral appropriation and sand down even those edges, until we're left with a "manifestation" so domesticated it wouldn't frighten a sparrow.

This is sterilization masquerading as spirituality. And it comes at a cost.

When we erase the battlefield origins of epiphaneia, we erase the theological contributions of military families. Combat veterans understand something about manifestation that liturgical committees often miss: divine intervention means rescue from something, not just presence to something. It means God showing up when you've called for fire support and are about to be overrun. It means breakthrough when all human capacity has failed. This isn't about glorifying violence—it's about recognizing that the Christian story emerges from occupied spiritual territory, from grunts facing imperial Entitlement, from contexts where divine rescue meant something because human rescue had proved impossible.

Psaul, who never served in Roman legions but frequently employed military language, kept that edge. He used epiphaneia to say: Christ's appearing is cosmic warfare. The Messiah doesn't just identify with the downtrodden; he manifests to defeat the powers crushing them. Isaiah's rod-of-his-mouth imagery isn't poetic flourish—it's the armament theology of Israel's prophetic imagination.

But our lectionaries prefer doves to battle standards. Our liturgical aesthetics run toward candlelight and contemplation, not toward the desperate prayers of those under fire. We've decided that "Epiphany" means gentle revelation rather than armed rescue, and in doing so, we've told military families that their experiential knowledge of manifestation, God showing up when everything depends on Them, doesn't count as legitimate theological data.

This isn't incidental exclusion. It's structural erasure. When we name a feast "Epiphany" but evacuate the term of its battlefield content, we're performing exactly the kind of theological violence that progressive Christianity claims to oppose. We take a word forged in the furnace of mortal crisis, baptize it in bourgeois spirituality, and then wonder why veterans feel religiously homeless.

The irony cuts deep: we celebrate a feast named for battlefield rescue while studiously avoiding any mention that this is what the word meant. Psaul kept the military edge. Civilian Christianity filed it off. And in that filing, we've communicated to generations of military families that their particular gifts—their experiential theology of desperate prayer and divine manifestation under fire—are at best tolerated, at worst unwelcome.

If we're going to have an Epiphany feast, let's at least be honest about what we're celebrating. Either we recover the battlefield origins of the vocabulary and honor what military families uniquely understand about divine rescue, or we stop using the word and admit we prefer our manifestations domesticated, our appearances genteel, our "epiphanies" stripped of anything that might remind us what rescue actually costs.